Among people my age (25) I feel I may be a bit of an anomaly when it comes to my music purchases. I could count on two hands the number of songs I’ve downloaded from iTunes. I still buy all my music on CD. I do import them into iTunes for convenience and to sync them with my iPhone, but I prefer to listen to the physical CD in most situations.
There are many reasons I’ve been a hold-out on making digital purchases, but f I’m honest, one of the main reasons is that I didn’t want to have to deal with backing up purchases, keeping things organized, syncing between devices, or transferring everything when I get a new device. After looking into iCloud, I’m considering the possibility of making more digital purchases. It looks like it will do a really good job of keeping things organized and backed up with no effort from me.
For now I still appreciate the pleasure of holding a CD, opening it, and looking through the packaging. I also prefer the higher quality audio on CDs compared to the compressed audio of a download (although I think the 256 kbps AAC files from iTunes are able to come pretty close). But for the first time I can imagine deciding to go completely digital. I hope audio quality will continue increasing as bandwidth does, and it may still be a few years before I’m comfortable and happy going digital. But I think soon it will be easy to own digital copies of all your media and wirelessly play it on your TV and stereo with minimal setup or effort on your part. I realize that stuff is possible already, but soon it will be so seamless and easy that it will be a normal part of American life. It sure will free up a lot of physical space for me.
Learn more about iCloud at apple.com.
Note: I’m in no way affiliated with Apple. I’m just a long time Mac user who has always been pleased with their products and the way they introduce innovative ideas that make things easier to do.